There is a car in Reno, Nevada, that has no right to exist. Low to the pavement. Black. Smooth in a way that 1938 had no vocabulary for. You walk around it and keep waiting for the seam — the place where the design runs out of nerve and retreats to something familiar. It never does.

The Phantom Corsair is 237 inches long and 57 inches tall. Put a ruler to those numbers. That’s nearly 20 feet of automobile crouching to shoulder height. No running boards. No fenders standing proud above the body. No door handles — not on the outside, anyway. The front wheels are buried under skirted bodywork so complete that the steering geometry required a custom solution nobody had tried before. In 1938, other cars still looked like carriages that had forgotten they didn’t need horses. This one looked like something that hadn’t been invented yet.

One was ever built. The man who conceived it died at 24.

<h3>The Heir Who Wouldn’t Comply</h3>

His name was Rust Heinz — Clarence Rust Heinz, to be precise — and his grandfather had built the H.J. Heinz Company into one of the most recognisable consumer brands in the world. His father, Howard Covode Heinz, ran the company by the time Rust was growing up. His older brother Jack would eventually take the chair after that. The family was Pittsburgh money, the old kind in the American sense, which meant it was perhaps forty years old and deeply suspicious of surprises.

Rust was a surprise.

Choate. Then Phillips Academy Andover. Then Yale, where he studied naval architecture and yacht design at the Westlawn Academy. He raced speedboats on weekends. He drew cars — not the cars that existed but the cars that logic suggested should. When he dropped out in 1936 and moved to Pasadena, California, to open an industrial design studio, the family was not pleased. “Much to the despair of his immediate family,” one journalist later wrote with admirable restraint. He was twenty-one, possibly twenty-two, depending on which of the conflicting genealogical records you believe. He had a fortune behind him and an idea ahead of him that he could not shake loose.

He’d bought a 1936 Cord 810. Drove it. Loved the front-wheel drive, the coffin-nose hood, the pre-selector gearbox with its aircraft-style lever. Hated the compromises. Sat down and started drawing.

<h3>What Bohman & Schwartz Built</h3>

The Cord 810 was already radical for its era — Gordon Buehrig’s design had won a medal from the Museum of Modern Art. Heinz used it as a sculptor uses an armature. He kept the running gear: the Lycoming L-head V8 displacing 289 cubic inches, aluminium cylinder heads, an 80-degree bank angle, 125 horsepower. He kept the four-speed electrically operated pre-selector gearbox and the front-wheel-drive transaxle. The front subframe — engine, transmission, suspension, all of it welded in — stayed. Everything from the cowl rearward, he scrapped. The old Cord body went to a Hollywood studio.

He approached Bohman & Schwartz of Pasadena. Christian Bohman, Swedish-born. Maurice Schwartz, the fabrication designer who began with wooden scale models and graduated to full-sized hammer forms for the aluminium panels. A metalworker named Bill Williams did most of the hammering. The custom chassis — rectangular chrome-moly steel tubing, parallel side rails, a central X-member — was fabricated by the A.J. Bayer Company in Vernon, California. Construction ran from late 1936 through the spring of 1937.

Schwartz later said the shape had no design precedent. He wasn’t bragging. He was being accurate.

<h3>The Car in Detail</h3>

What they produced was this.

A fastback coupe with six-passenger seating — four across the front, two rear passengers seated in a rumble-style configuration facing rearward. No exterior door handles anywhere on the body. Doors opened via electric push-buttons flush with the surface. When a door swung out, small roof flaps flipped upward above the opening, easing entry like a mechanical bow. The hood operated on electro-hydraulic rams. The headlights were Woodlite cats-eye lamps integrated directly into the nose. Triple-bladed chrome bumpers at both ends sat on telescoping hydraulic rams — functionally, impact-absorbing bumpers — two years before the rest of the industry thought the idea was worth pursuing. All glass was green-tinted, triple-layer safety laminate.

The interior was mission control. Standard Cord instruments plus a compass, altimeter, barometer, oil temperature, manifold vacuum, battery-charge indicator, and fuel economiser — roughly a dozen gauges in total. An overhead console above the centre windscreen pillar monitored open doors, headlights-on status, and the radio. Cork composition and sponge rubber lined the ceiling and walls, sometimes to one and a half inches thick, for sound deadening and impact protection. The seats were cast solid rubber, no conventional springs underneath them. Built-in cabinets flanking the rear seating held spun aluminium tumblers and a crystal decanter. An all-wave radio, twin speakers, an aviation-type aerial.

Heinz had also planned thermostatically controlled air conditioning and a shortwave radio installation. Neither was ever completed.

<h3>The Spec Sheet</h3><table style="width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;margin:1em 0"><tr><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;font-weight:bold;width:35%">Chassis</td><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd">Modified 1936 Cord 810 — front subframe, drivetrain, FWD system retained</td></tr><tr><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;font-weight:bold">Engine</td><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd">Lycoming L-head V8, 289 cu in (4,739 cc), 80° bank, aluminium heads</td></tr><tr><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;font-weight:bold">Output</td><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd">125 bhp (stock, naturally aspirated)</td></tr><tr><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;font-weight:bold">Transmission</td><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd">4-speed electrically operated pre-selector, Bendix Fingertip Control</td></tr><tr><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;font-weight:bold">Drive</td><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd">Front-wheel drive, retained from Cord 810</td></tr><tr><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;font-weight:bold">Body</td><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd">Hand-beaten aluminium over welded aviation-steel tube frame</td></tr><tr><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;font-weight:bold">Dimensions</td><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd">237 in L × 76.5 in W × 57 in H | Wheelbase: 125 in</td></tr><tr><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;font-weight:bold">Weight</td><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd">Approx. 4,600 lb (2,090 kg)</td></tr><tr><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;font-weight:bold">Seating</td><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd">6 — four abreast front; two rear facing rearward</td></tr><tr><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;font-weight:bold">Top Speed</td><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd">Claimed 115 mph — disputed; weight and power suggest optimism</td></tr><tr><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;font-weight:bold">Build Cost</td><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd">,000–,000 (1937 USD); approx. ,000 in 2026 dollars</td></tr><tr><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;font-weight:bold">Proposed Price</td><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd">,500 per production replica</td></tr><tr><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;font-weight:bold">Units Built</td><td style="padding:6px 10px;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd">1 (prototype only; no production)</td></tr><tr><td style="padding:6px 10px;font-weight:bold">Current Home</td><td style="padding:6px 10px">National Automobile Museum, Reno, Nevada</td></tr></table>

One technical claim in circulation demands specific attention. Many sources put the engine’s output at 190 horsepower, attributing the figure to modifications by Andy Granatelli, who owned the car briefly in 1947. When the Corsair was restored in the early 1970s, renovation work found no evidence of special tuning. The stock Lycoming output was 125 horsepower. The 190 figure — still cited widely — appears to be either a later modification credited to the wrong era, or a number that Heinz himself put into his promotional materials and no one troubled to verify. This article uses 125 horsepower. The distinction matters.

<h3>The Problems Nobody Wanted to Discuss</h3>

The car had fundamental flaws, and Heinz knew some of them.

That long, smooth, unbroken nose was aerodynamically elegant and thermally disastrous. It choked airflow to the radiator. Overheating plagued the car from early on; the eventual solution was a pair of Lincoln radiators, which is not something an automobile looking this sleek should require. Visibility through the low split windshield was poor — not uncomfortable poor, but there-are-things-you-cannot-see poor. At 4,600 pounds with 125 horsepower underneath, the claimed top speed of 115 miles per hour was, in the diplomatic assessment of one journalist, optimistic. Subsequent owners found it underpowered. Every single one of them said so, at some point, in some way.

The production plans remained alive regardless. Heinz had a glossy brochure printed listing a price of ,500 per production replica. That was about ten times what a new Ford cost. In 1938. In the middle of the Great Depression. The brochure was meticulous and convincing. It attracted zero orders.

<h3>Hollywood Before the World’s Fair</h3>

David O. Selznick’s production company noticed the car before the public did. In 1938 they licenced the Corsair for a comedy called The Young in Heart, distributed by United Artists and directed by Richard Wallace. Janet Gaynor, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Paulette Goddard, Roland Young, Billie Burke. Three Academy Award nominations — two for music, one for cinematography. Modest box office. In the picture, the Corsair played a fictional British luxury car called the Flying Wombat.

That nickname almost certainly originated with W.C. Fields, who ad-libbed it on a separate Hollywood set in 1937. A syndicated columnist picked it up. Selznick’s people found it and used it. The name persisted in popular shorthand for decades afterward. What Heinz himself called the car has, apparently, never been documented anywhere. The origin of the name “Phantom Corsair” is equally undocumented — no contemporary source explains why it was chosen.

At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the Corsair appeared under the banner “The Car of Tomorrow.” It was the last major public exhibition during Heinz’s lifetime. He flew home to Pittsburgh that summer to visit friends. On the night of July 23rd, he went dancing.

<h3>The Hat That Ended Everything</h3>

On the early morning of July 24th, 1939, near the George Westinghouse Memorial Bridge in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, Rust Heinz let his friend Phil Brainard take the wheel of his open Buick convertible. Brainard’s trilby hat blew off in the slipstream. They turned around to go back for it — a completely ordinary impulse, the sort of thing anyone might do. Returning to the Lincoln Highway near Versailles, the Buick was hit broadside by another vehicle in the dark.

Six people were injured. Heinz took a severe blow to the head.

He died the following morning. He was buried in the Heinz family mausoleum at Homewood Cemetery in Pittsburgh — Section 14, Lot 61. He was twenty-four years old. Or twenty-five. The genealogical record carries an unresolved discrepancy in his birth year, 1914 versus 1913, and neither side is fully convincing. History has never settled it.

A hat blew off a man’s head on a Pennsylvania highway. That is how the future died.

<h3>Eight Decades, Six Owners</h3>

The car survived him.

Jack Heinz, Rust’s brother, gave it to Lou Maxon, who ran the Heinz advertising account and was a family friend. Maxon’s son drove it for a period, reportedly as a graduation reward. Around 1943, it passed to William Stroh of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Around 1947, racing brothers Joe and Andy Granatelli owned it briefly in Chicago. Andy had it repainted metallic bronze. They found it too slow and moved on.

The comedian Herb Shriner acquired it next, sometime in the early 1950s, and did the most consequential thing any post-Heinz owner attempted. He hired Albrecht Goertz — the German-born designer who had just completed the BMW 507 and BMW 503 for the Munich factory — to address the car’s practical shortcomings. Goertz added nostril-style air ducts to the nose for cooling, raised the windshield height, fitted two removable targa-style roof panels, and repainted the car in a gold-and-black two-tone scheme. The modified Corsair appeared at the 1954 New York Auto Show.

In 1970, Herb Shriner and his wife Pixie were killed in a road accident, driving a Studebaker Avanti. He was the second Corsair owner to die on the road. The estate sold the car to Tom Barrett, the automotive dealer. Barrett sold it in 1971 to Bill Harrah, the casino magnate, who commissioned a complete restoration to the car’s exact 1938 configuration — reversing every modification Goertz had made. The work took approximately a year.

Harrah died in 1978. His 1,453-vehicle collection was largely dispersed, but the Corsair was not among what was sold. It became a centrepiece of the National Automobile Museum in Reno when that institution opened in 1989. It is there today, in excellent restored condition, the engine reportedly still operational. It has been shown at Goodwood, Pebble Beach, and Amelia Island. Mattel released it as a Hot Wheels model in 1999. It appears in the video games Mafia and L.A. Noire.

<h3>What It Means</h3>

The Phantom Corsair is often described as being ahead of its time. That framing is accurate but insufficient. Envelope bodywork, integrated fenders, skirted wheels, flush surfaces, hidden hardware — these became automotive conventions in the postwar era. The Corsair anticipated all of them, completed roughly a year before the Buick Y-Job, commonly cited as the first concept car. The difference is that Heinz built his as a production prototype, not a styling exercise. He was trying to sell it.

He couldn’t. The price was ruinous, the market was depressed, and the car had real mechanical problems. None of which changes what it was. Maurice Schwartz built something with no precedent and said so plainly. He was right.

A twenty-three-year-old with a fortune and an unshakeable idea, a coachbuilder willing to swing the hammer, a machine that defied its decade in every visible way — and then a highway in Pennsylvania and a hat blowing off a running board and everything stopping at once.

<p style="font-style:italic;color:#888;margin-top:1.5em">One car. One owner. The arithmetic of that has a way of staying with you.</p>